Blogging revisited

Courting Disaster has been off-line for nearly 18 months – and let’s face it, it was hardly updating regularly towards the end of that time.

So, here we are: rebooted and hopefully updating two or three times a week.

In brief, the last eighteen months have consisted of:

• moving house (yes, again!) in December 2006, to the most adorable part of Cambridge, Newnham;
• interviewing for three or four teaching positions and being offered a lectureship at a London university;
• submitting the PhD thesis in May 2007;
• marrying the love of my life in Canberra in June 2007;
• being examined on the PhD in August 2007;
• starting the new job in September 2007;
• crawling elated, scared and knackered by turns through a first term of teaching (while commuting from Cambridge);
• graduating from the PhD and having a second wedding ceremony (well, a blessing) for UK friends and visiting Australian family in November 2007;
• having a quiet Christmas in Dahab, Egypt;
• crawling elated, scared and knackered – but generally more confident - through a second term of teaching;
• writing questions for and administering exams (and there’s a blog in that!);
• marking, marking and bloody marking exams (only 84 undergraduate essays, three dissertations, 92 exam scripts and double marking the same again);
• proposing a couple of new courses;
• getting the PhD turned into a book proposal, peer-reviewed, committee-approved and a contract issued with a publisher; and
• oh, look it’s just about our first wedding anniversary.

Busy? Just a bit.

Movin’, movin’, movin’

(New desk, click for bigger image)



I’ve often blogged about how often I move. However, the last two years in Cambridge I managed to stay in the same building and just upgrade rooms. Easiest move ever: just prop two doors open and carry everything up a flight of stairs.

Now, though, I’ve finally done it. Private accommodation, outside the sheltering womb of college and onto the UK rental market. After looking at some total dives, I got lucky. There’s a flat just behind the law faculty that’s been handed down through a few generations of Trinity Hall PhD students now. The location is ideal, the rent is very good and the carpets … well, let’s not talk about the carpets.

The flat is, a rarity for Britain, let without furniture. The system that’s evolved is incoming flatmates pay the out-goer for their room furnishing and the communal bits and bobs, then add and subtract as they see fit.

I immediately wanted to subtract a desk (huge, government issue, ugly with heavy metal filing drawers), a small wardrobe with vanity (less than 30 centimetres rail space) and a chest of drawers. The drawers were amusing. You could open three of four on any given day, but with few guarantees as to which. (“Right, I’m just about ready to go out … but it seems my socks and underwear are not. Hmm …”)

So I hit the local Salvation Army store where the finest in Cambridge’s veteran and slightly scarred furniture turns up. I found a big sturdy wardrobe, an impulse-buy armchair and a mock-Edwardian, seven-drawer writing desk. The nice people there even said they’d take away my old furniture as a donation (and, frankly, a kindness) when they delivered.

I paid up and turned to leave when I saw the fateful sign: “It is your responsibility to check furniture will fit through your doors.”

I measured the width of my new desk. About 80 centimetres and thought of the narrow front door to the new flat. “It’ll be fine,” I thought.

Getting home, I measured the back of the door, 81 cm, and sighed with relief.

Then realised the door has a thickness. Opened, the thickness of the door would have to be subtracted from the width of the frame. I measured the door's thickness, 4 cm.

“It’ll be fine!” I thought, not very convinced.

Next day the Salvo’s arrived and genially hauled my first piece up the stairs: the desk. Lining it up with door, it just wouldn’t go through. It couldn’t be angled around as the stairway was too tight, the door opened into a tiny vestibule and the desk’s sides were solid.

“Um,” I said in desperation, “if you lend me a screwdriver, I’ll take the front door off its hinges.”

So, they schlepped to and fro with furniture old and new(er), while I removed the front door and parked it inside.

The desk was heaved up again, rotated on its side and gently eased towards the door frame. And stopped.

“Just needs another quarter of an inch,” one of the deliverers said. “Tell you what. Take the screwdriver and see if you can get the top off.”

Fortunately, it looked like this had been done before: a variety of screws secured the writing surface on only three sides. With the top off, it slid through. Just.

“You like this because it had character, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered sheepishly, “I guess I just didn’t realise how much.”

“Hmm. Do you want us to stay while you reassemble that, or are you going to buy a screwdriver?”

Keys and Porters 2
 
So I’m presently in the midst of a four-day stint of life admin between bouts of travel.
 
Today I was repacking some of my belongings into cardboard boxes in the storage room I’m using at college – and recalled the disaster I had three weeks ago moving my stuff into it.
 
I’ve partially afforded my recent travel by letting my room go over the summer, but this has meant storing my things. Had I been at the main graduate accommodation complex, this would have just meant schlepping everything down to the storeroom.
 
But I was at a college satellite property. (“Satellite” in the sense of being closer to the centre of town than, say, the moon.) I was damned if I was going to haul dozens of little boxes a one-hour return trip by bike up to the main grad site.
 
So I swung access to a basically disused (over summer anyway) bit of office space in college and took several big-ish boxes in by taxi, signed out the one key for the office in question at the Porter’s Lodge, took my first box up a flight of stairs, deposited it and the key on the office floor and left, the door slamming.
 
With. The. Only. Key. Inside.
 
There was no other key. Many, many people who have had the use of this room over time have dissipated all spare keys.
 
I did the only thing you can do in such a situation. I went for a Porter.
 
The Porter on duty was a big, solid chap with a strong, creased face. Had I been told he’d been hand-carved from something ancient and probably oaken, it would have come as no surprise.
 
He followed me into a courtyard and looked up at the half-open office window.
 
 “Oh, for a ladder,” he said, phlegmatically.
 
As it was a weekend, the maintenance department had left all their ladders locked up. We did find an old wooden ladder at the back of the carpenters’ store, in a pile of scrap wood.
 
“I’ll get it,” I said. “As it was me that locked the keys in, I should go up.”
 
We trudged back, leaned the ladder up the wall where it stopped two feet below the little mediaeval looking window, all small glass panes set in iron, half-ajar.
 
“Too short,” was the Porter’s assessment. “How do you feel about going up?”
 
“That last two feet makes me nervous,” I replied, wondering if we could stand the ladder on a nearby bench.
 
“Hold this a moment,” said the Porter, putting a foot on a rung.
 
I grabbed it, presuming he was testing it for strength. Suddenly, he was at the top, with his head in the open half of the window.
 
“I can see the key,” he said. “If nothing else, I can see the key. Hold on a second.”
 
He got his fingers inside the frame, then one shoe on the sandstone window ledge, and then he had one black-trousered leg inside the window.
 
I am tall, but slightly built. I was confident I could have gotten through the small opening the window offered. A man a head taller and built like something recently detached from a cliff face I worried about.
 
He was poised, half-in and half-out, suspended by little but his fingers. “God, I’m going to kill a Porter,” I though, envisaging him falling head-first onto the flagstones.
 
Then with a twist and a duck he was in. Minutes later he was standing in the courtyard, dust all over one knee, handing me the key.
 
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve trees this height at home. Up and down ladders all the time.”

Once more unto the boxes

For what seems the millionth damn time I am stuffing the material ephemera of my life (aka “possessions”) into cardboard boxes taken from the local supermarket.

As I have complained before this is a process that has taken me from: Curtin (Canberra), to Coogee and eventually Balmain via a house-sit in Drummoyne (Sydney), Northcote and then Brunswick East (Melbourne), then back home to the parents’ place outside Canberra before coming to Cambridge – where a tenacious cardboard box with strong homing instincts did manage to track me down eventually.

I have been reappraising the contents of that solitary box, kindly packed by the parents in the present process of packing up my room. It did arrive with my suit, which has been useful for all manner of less-than-black-tie occasions. It also contained an extra towel, two bathmats, two Floriade tea-towels and – a little mysteriously – two bright yellow cloth napkins.

In fairness, I had had some towel-related problems on arrival (see the old October 2 “Keys and Porters” tale of woe); but I have never quite found a need for two cloth napkins. However, I may yet wind up inviting some charming person with an obsession with bright primary colours to an intimate candle-lit dinner, in which case I’m set.

The next question is where to store my four or five boxes of possession while I roam Europe, the UK and Australia over the Summer. I’m giving up my present room to save on rent, but other flatmates will be here through to October – so I’m strongly thinking about just stashing most of my stuff in the cupboard under the stairs and leaving my laptop with some PhD friends at their flat.

If, on my return in September, I have a new address, the stats since 1999 will break down as follows:

Number of addresses in the Canberra region – 2;
Number of addresses in Sydney – 4 (2 in Coogee alone);
Number of addresses in Melbourne – 2; and
UK addresses – 2.

It’s enough to make a man want to own property.

Coming soon: tales of a tele-fundraiser, the long wash-up of May Week madness and my initiation into a week-and-a-half old secret society.

Cambridge: arriving with more whimper than bang
(travel blog from Doug)

So, I’m finally here. *gasp, pant* Arrived Monday, spent two days commuting to London to sight-see, and went to the first law orientation lecture this morning (though classes don’t start properly until the 9th).

There’s a goodly number of new graduate students wandering around with a “oh, wow” and “if I weren’t so overwhelmed right now, I’d probably be freaking out” sort of expression. Including me.

There’s a lot of administrative stuff to sort out before classes start. Not to mention sorting out the dynamics of living in a house with five other men (yes, a six boy, all-male house), with two bathrooms and three toilets.

But no-one wants that guff, they want narrative.

The baggage haul: escape from Paris
(or, “you’ll miss nothing if you skip this bit”)

So, my last day in Paris I’d built over an hour’s safety margin into my plan to get to out to Charles De Gaulle - and needed every minute of it. I just missed the 10.00 am transfer bus advertised by my hotel, and the next bus was at 10.30. (Proof you should make those connections by taxi, not metro.)

Still, my flight wasn’t until 12.25, plenty of time.

Wrong. I was on an Air France transfer bus, and British Airways (my Qantas partner) was their LAST drop-off. When I just made check-in, I simply couldn’t be bothered attempting to conceal the vast 38 kg extent of my luggage. I received a very sweet warning about “next time” from the charming French check-in attendant, who checked my bag and back-pack without blinking.

So much for all my scheming over hand luggage.

On arrival at Gatwick I whipped through immigration (after a slightly nerve-wracking three minute quiz) grabbed my bags and was told at the bus counter I could transfer to the 1 pm bus, leaving in 5 minutes. As this would get me into Cambridge at 5-ish not 6-ish, I seized the moment (and my bags) and ran for the bus.

Well, more scooted towards the bus with a fractious luggage trolley that constantly veered left, but whatever.

Cambridge, the Santa Porter and a towel

Four long hours later, I hit Cambridge, and managed to muddle my way down from the bus station, through the cobbled market square, to the Trinity Hall Porters lodge (at the end of a long alley beside the Senate House) and got some keys from a veritable English Santa Claus of a Porter.

My house, it turned out, was a fair bit out of the centre of town. I was solemnly advised by Mr Porter, on viewing my luggage, to catch a taxi.

A Cambridge black cab, with “hackney carriage” emblazoned on its side, got out to my house for £5 and – after struggling with a slightly stiff door key, I dumped my bags in my room and headed out to buy the vital thing I was missing – a towel.

Douglas Adams was right, a dude should know where his towel is. Had I had one with me, I would have been spared a good deal of drama.

Of towels, and keys

It was a half-hour walk into town and by 6 pm the only thing seemingly open was Marks and Spencers, which had a discount fluffy bath towel for £10. I grabbed it and some food, not realising the cheaper Sainsbury’s was open up the road.

After a 30 minute walk home, I could not get the front door key to work.

I was stupefied, towel-bearing and darkness was closing in. All hopes of hot bath or a soothing gin lay beyond the stubborn green door with its pretty stained glass panels. My previous experience of being locked out did not reassure me.

I went down to my major thoroughfare, Mill Road (a good place for cheap eats, pubs, bikes, wine, computers, pubs, and books – there may also be a pub or two) bought a chicken burger and the walked back to contemplate the door again.

It was still – despite both my efforts *and* the purchase of a chicken burger - locked.

No-one else was home. I did not have a number for the Porter’s lodge. I was facing another 30 minute walk into town.

My will snapped and I caught another cab.

“Can you drop me at the Senate House?” I asked.

“Where are you going, then?” asked the cabbie.

I explained my situation and said my landlord was Trinity Hall.

“I can drop you at Trinity Hall if you like,” replied the cabbie.

“Fine,” I said with faintly dubious gratitude. “If it’s possible.”

It is indeed, it seems, possible to hurtle a cab through a series of narrow cobbled alleys not seemingly wide enough to both park and open a door.

It can even be done without removing side-mirrors.

I was amazed, and happily parted with another £5 at the former coach-entrance to Trinity. (I later learned that busses are equally cavalier - or skilled – when I had to slowly back up against a wall to allow a bus to wiggle round a corner in the manner a large, blue, brick shaped cat might.)

The benevolent Santa Clause-like Porter swapped my door key, gave me the Lodge number and said to call if the changed key didn’t work on my return.

I caught another cab home (my legs still weak and aching from two weeks’ sight-seeing), and duly failed to open the door. After calls to the Porters from a phone booth, the college Director of Works was summoned. The sight of a large man struggling with my small key ensued.

He eventually won the battle and got me in

“It’s new, that’s what it is. Not your fault,” he grumbled.

Only in Cambridge could something’s failure to work be blamed on its being new (ie installed after Gladstone was Prime Minister).

I was then armed with a back-door key as an alternative, and promised that the front door lock would be changed in the morning.

I had a bath, a gin and tonic, and stepped out through the back door to walk down to the phone booth and call my parents. I put the key in the backdoor to lock it.

And there it jammed, in the lock.

I had gone from a house I could not open, to one I could not secure.

I trudged the block and a half to call the Porters, and assure them that tomorrow would be soon enough to call out the Director again to free the key I had wedged irretrievably into the lock.

But I called my parents first.

And sheepishly succeeded in un-jamming the lock again on my own on my return, though not without the sort of stupefied pride normally reserved for apprentices drawing swords from stones.

Not really such a bad moving to a new town story, what’s your worst?

Final days and counting

Ah, a quiet farewell lunch. Given that much of the organisation is off at conferences this week I am spared speech-making at a farewell afternoon tea. Normally, I quite like making speeches – unlike many I try and keep them pithy and sit down before people start drooling from boredom or in their sleep – but the last guy to leave presented his humorous farewell speech in surprisingly good rhyming couplets.

I hate following a tough act.

Anyway, after a terribly pleasant lunch of fish, white wine and an Italian waiter whose recitation of the specials would have done a town crier proud, I am full of love towards humanity in general – as well as being full of fish and white wine.

The removalists did indeed show up yesterday, and conforming to stereotype, consisted of the older more experienced mover (who did more of the papers and talking and less of the lifting) and the younger mover (who seemed less attached to the job and more figuring out what comes next).

I was, however, sufficiently stressed that I woke up early and by 6.30am was dismantling my bed and trying to wrap my mattress in plastic. My boss then kindly gave me the whole afternoon off so I’d have plenty of time to get everything done before the removalists were expected. I was still sufficiently uptight and sleep deprived that I managed to get on the wrong train home and had to get off in Footscray and find a taxi.

Ooops.

Still, every box I packed is inventoried, numbered and has my father’s contact details and a map of how to get to the appropriate rural property outside Canberra taped to its lid.

Yes, I am a control freak.

Anyway, I am now feeling more relaxed. The rest of the week though is a social blitz: farewell lunch today, farewell dinner with the other young lawyers at my level on Thursday and then the obligatory farewell drinks on Friday. I may or may not scrape myself out for brunch on Saturday before flying out in the afternoon.

Sometime last week I gave up on eating at home, too much chance of the groceries just going to waste. It’s a tough job, eating out all the time in Melbourne, but dammit, when I live virtually on Lygon street, I’m willing to give it a go.

Wild mood swings, strong coffee and wardrobes

I had to take two hours off work this morning to supervise the removalists collecting my gorgeous tawny, century-old wardrobe for the auctioneer’s. Past removalists (cowboys) have chipped it, put nicks in the door, and mysteriously warped one handle out of shape.

At least these guys seemed competent, careful and cheerful. Still, I consigned it to their care without even a signed docket. I accepted my boss’ opinion as to a couple of auction places, phoned around, was referred over the phone by an auction house to a removalist, who then delegated the job to another guy. I am trusting to reputation and could just as easily have handed it over to furniture thieves.

But frankly, even if it were stolen, I’d feel relieved. I’d invested that intractably heavy, awkward, beautiful object (and what to do with it) with so much of my angst over moving house, relocating overseas, studying again and the inevitable administrative to and fro between Cambridge and my scholarship organisation.

Much as I loved it, much as its solid presence made everywhere I’ve landed home, I’d really started to see caring for the wardrobe as a liability and was getting guilty about the damage my serial moves were doing to it.

So yesterday, I was almost crippled by paranoia that the removalists would never confirm a pick-up time and I’d have to start over, that I’d not get funding confirmation from the scholarship in time to make Cambridge’s deadline, that I’d lost a library book, that I’d never get my new room in order in time for a guest this weekend, that I need to look at selling my car and booking the next removal of my stuff to my parents’ in Canberra, that the cat I accidentally let out last night would never come back, etc, etc, etc.

This morning, with the wardrobe gone and a triple black coffee at the morning tea, though, I’m now feeling on top of the world – I have the sense of having done my best to find a neglected pet a good home.

Now, if I could just stop jittering enough to do my work.

Brown tape, brown cardboard boxes; dear god, it's moving day

So I moved on the weekend. And drunk Belgian beer with Beth and others. But mostly the moving thing.

No, the limp is only temporary and the ligaments will reattach any time soon. Last time I ever: (a) do this without removalists; and (b) turn down spontaneous offers of help from several friends. But at the time, I really did think I’d only need help with my bookshelf, mattress and bed-head. And my old landlord and new flatmates did give me a hand with those and other big items.

Still, I managed to foolishly wind up doing perhaps a bit too much on my own.

There is always so much more stuff than you anticipate, and it takes so much longer. Still, zooming about in a rental one-ton van was pretty nifty, once I got over my initial terror and remembered how to drive a manual.

Observation on moving from Thornbury to East Brunswick: only ten minutes apart by car, and it really does feel like the difference between the suburbs and the inner city – farewell excessively wide nature strips, farewell Italian and Greek pensioners taking their constitutional stroll; hello narrow, grassless pavements and share-house students on bicycles. Big plusses of the new house: it’s warm, the bathroom doesn’t flood every time you step from the shower, and it’s much handier for public transport. (I caught a tram to work this morning and it only took 20 minutes!)

I have also gone from sharing with one cat, to two. Munchka – who is the cutest little thing, enough to warm even the heart of a confirmed cat-sceptic like myself – and her somewhat overweight son, He Who Reigns in Darkness and Terror (actually, he’s been pretty good to me so far, I just don’t recall his name).

Still unpacking though, and I have an inter-state visitor this weekend. Perhaps I’m trying to cram a little too much in at the moment …

Just a free-rambling fool …

Once more, I'm stepping off into the unknown. The death knell has sounded, my landlord has confirmed the auction for 24 May and a sixty day settlement period thereafter to vacate the premises.

Even if I’m only in Melbourne until the end of my contract on 15 October, that still leaves me two and a half months without a place, looking for some share-household crazy or desperate enough to take me in on the understanding I may have to do a runner after ten weeks. Bugger.

Okay, I’m no John Birmingham, but in the period November 2000 to October 2002 I moved six times and had seven addresses. Let’s recap:

1. The First Flat of Brunch. Lovely little place in Curtin, Canberra I shared with Marissa of the ruminator for, what, two years? Best rental I’ve ever had. But what was great was the people who lived near by: we evolved a weekend brunch and frisbee group of friends and neighbours that set the tone for each weekend with a cook-up, coffee and banter – and exercise later in the day.

2. The temporary move home to my parents place for the Summer of Unemployment before moving to Sydney.

3. Coogee Beach I: The Hideous Flat of Doom. Certain combinations of people are just not meant to share close personal space, but when I first moved to Sydney, despite the corporate cash I was soon to be pulling down, I was flat broke. I needed a cheap place and sharing a modest flat with two cheerful women for $115 a week, two blocks from Coogee beach and a half hour from work seemed ideal.

It wasn’t.

I dined out for months on how awful one of my flatmates was. Her best effort? The night I came home to find her spilling drunk into a taxi with a few of her mates, my CD player broken and all my wine drunk cinched it. I tried to believe she was a nice person by her own standards, with whom I just I had communication issues.

I eventually had to face facts - she was a demon from an alternate universe designed for my personal torment. I slapped down three weeks notice and bolted to the first place available ...

4. Coogee Beach II: The Lads Pad. A friend was posted to Korea and I moved into his room on a temporary sub-lease. My new flatmate was Rob, who I’d met maybe three times. We had nothing in common: I drank, he didn’t (he’s since come back to the fold); I read fiction, he read business texts and Bertrand Russell; he loved the corporate life, it was eroding my sanity; he could cheerfully get up at 6 for a long jog every morning, I liked once-weekly yoga – we had nothing in common.

Except the most immature sense of humour imaginable.

It was silly: there were bad jokes, film clips were watched in boxer shorts, we debated the merits of ironing, we laughed ourselves stupid and wrote our worst witticisms up on a corkboard. (An example - Doug: “If I have any more coffee today, you’re going to come home to find me naked, licking the wallpaper.” We did not, of course, have wallpaper. We were living in our own surrealist sketch comedy.) Along with Marissa, one of the greatest friends and most easy-to-share-with flatmates I’ve ever found.

Unfortunately, Korea guy came back from Korea and wanted his room back.

5. House-sitting in Drummoyne: five weeks, no rent, a place to store my stuff while I looked around. Perfect, other than breaking down the middle of a major intersection on Oxford Street while moving there ... some tow truck drivers are just psychos.

6. This Life: Balmain. Living with three other lawyers is much less exciting than it might sound. We had a staggered start and finish to the day: people got up between 6 and 8.30 am, using the bathroom in pretty strict sequence. We got home between 7.30 and 11.30 pm at equally precise intervals. Then I became a public servant for a bit and started getting home at 6 – it was like living on the Marie Celeste some nights.

Fabulous, fabulous guys to share with – shame we never really saw each other. Still, if I had to go back to Sydney, I’d happily live in Balmain again. Catching the ferry across Sydney harbour to work is an unbeatable experience.

7. Digs in Thornbury/Northcote with the Gentleman Academic. The best thing, other than my peppercorn rent, was not having to look for a place in Melbourne - before I’d even started looking, a mutual friend e-mailed me to say the Gentleman had a room, was I interested? Damn right I was, and any day I haven’t locked myself out of the house has been a good one here.

It’ll be a shame to move again.

I’m not sure my massive century-old wardrobe can handle any more nicks and dints from “careful” removalists.